Six ways social media ruined marketing

While we celebrate things that brought us phantom twitches in our index fingers and thumbs, and the age of the narcissists, let’s also take a moment to look at the damage done to marketing by bad habits that are a direct result of excessively indiscriminate use of social media.

“1 Lakh views. 10,000 likes. achievement unlocked!”:

Likes are not buys! A million views on YouTube means nothing if, say, most of the comments are negative. Besides views/likes/shares and their ilk can be bought. Quantity matters more than quality. The immediate fallout of the likeconomy and using social media features as metrics is bad habits and judgment calls, which happen when marketers over-value interactions over real connections that unearth actionable insights, and use likes, views, followers, retweets as a measure of campaign success.

What’s advertising good for?:

At the same time marketers became more and more obsessive about “social media strategy” and started sentences about campaign effectiveness with “the ad got one lakh views”, traditional advertising became a medium to unleash one’s inner Kurosawa and refine award gathering skills. Instead of focusing, with renewed vigor, on making advertising that moves product.

In the marketer’s ceaseless pursuit to be part of every trending topic (if not the trending hashtag), there’s bound to be a few ill-timed and not thought through contributions to internet chatter. That’s when brands become easy targets and get extensively trolled on social media. Marketing history is littered with brands’ social media faux pas. Which bring us to the other downside: Once bitten, twice shy. Marketers, many unwittingly perhaps, have retreated to the tried, tested and boring. Thus becoming risk-averse and choosing to be extra cautious over genuinely innovative.

I’m not your BAE!:

Remember when brands wanted to be our ‘BAE’? And still want to take selfies with us at a cricket match or in our pajamas? Marketers want their brands to be ‘on fleek’. They are also delusional. In the social media era we’ve seen an acceleration of a dangerous tendency, which is the humanization of brands. Marketers’ misguided quest to build meaningful connections and friendships with people through “conversations” on social media has blinded them to an inherent limitation — a brand is not a person! Do we really want to get chatty with our toilet cleaner?

The rise of the influencer:

A word that sends shudders down the spine of even the most seasoned, battle-hardened marketer. A creation of their making, influencers are a breed of brand advocates that are, in quite a few quarters, increasingly displaying mercenary tendencies. The Second Sons of the marketing world, they have no brand loyalties, and that’s fundamentally what’s wrong with influencer marketing. What doesn’t help matters is the bean-counter marketer’s uninspired deployment of influencers.

SMTDS – Social media transmitted diseases:

Social media is also responsible for the proliferation of terrible afflictions like, what marketing professor Mark Ritson calls ‘morbus digitalis’: A digital disease he describes in Marketing Week as “a sickness characterised by erratic and irresponsible behaviour such as swapping TV advertising for Tinder.”